Peter Boughton's blog articles tagged:CFMLhttp://blogs.peterboughton.net/feed.atom?filter:tag=cfml2015-03-27T16:25:15ZPeter Boughtonhttp://peterboughton.nethttp://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/lucee-on-jettyIntroducing Lucee on Jetty2015-02-21T23:45:00Z2015-02-21T23:45:00Z<p><a href="http://sorcerersisle.com/projects:lucee-on-jetty">Lucee on Jetty</a> bundles the <a href="http://eclipse.org/jetty">Jetty server</a> with the <a href="http://lucee.org">Lucee CFML engine</a>,
cleanly configured using the home/base functionality in Jetty 9, and extensively documented.</p>
<p>The main aim is to provide a Lucee package that is a simple unzip-and-run to get
started, whilst providing a fully functional and capable web server, and also
making it clear how everything works to allow it to be adapted as needed.</p>
<p>This first release is v0.5 because I don't consider it sufficiently complete yet
- it all works fine, but doesn't yet contain everything I feel it should - for
example, HTTPS has not been configured and documented, and whilst Jetty itself
does support HTTPS and there's nothing stopping anyone consulting the Jetty docs
and setting it up, this project is about reducing that work.</p>
<p>So for development use it's fine, if you don't need HTTPS or are willing to
configure it yourself, go ahead - otherwise I hope to get what I consider a
complete v1.0 ready as soon as time permits, but didn't want to delay releasing
what I've done so far.</p>
<p>Downloads are available from the <a href="http://sorcerersisle.com/projects:lucee-on-jetty">Lucee on Jetty project page</a>; there's a
<a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/lucee-on-jetty/wiki">documentation wiki</a> at GitHub, and the template for building bundles in
the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/lucee-on-jetty">GitHub repo</a> .</p>
<p>As ever, I welcome any feedback or questions you might have - please use the
<a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/lucee-on-jetty/issues">issue tracker</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/luceeLucee2015-01-29T23:59:00Z2015-01-29T23:59:00Z<p>Lucee is the best CFML engine.</p>
<p>Nine years ago I began a blog article with a similar claim, and set out to
explain why Railo was at that time the best CFML engine. Well the simplest proof
of Lucee taking the crown is that Lucee is a fork of Railo by its original
creator, Michael Offner.</p>
<p>The thing that made Railo great and that Lucee will be taking further is in
being a CFML engine written for developers. That is to say, with features added
through developers saying "I need feature X to do my job better" - and
specifically <em>not</em> via vague ideas decided on by product managers getting
feedback from non-technical clients who say "we need to do mobile" and then
having a bunch of disconnected non-programmers come up with a horrendously buggy
and useless mess called cfclient. <em>Eugh!</em></p>
<p>Good programmers already know what tools they need to achieve certain tasks,
and if those tools don't exist or aren't good enough, they need the ability to
create/improve them - that is what Micha gave us with Railo, and Lucee promises
to take this further - to make it even easier for the developer community to
adapt it to their needs.</p>
<p>Bering a fork, Lucee continues the versioning from Railo, launching tonight with
Lucee 4.5 available already, and an excellent Lucee 5 just around the corner.</p>
<h3>Why Not Railo?</h3>
<p>Many will be wondering why fork Railo, instead of working on what was there, and
the best way to answer that is simply to refer to what Brad Wood has already
written on the Railo mailing list: <a href="">https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/railo/B_1S3WzVPXY/hlIeZDE1u98J</a></p>
<p>To re-iterate the key points: this is the original Railo developer, taking the
Railo source code, and refreshing the project. Don't mistake for division what
is actually an inclusive evolution, and importantly: a sign of exciting things
to come!</p>
<h3>Lucee 5</h3>
<p>With the next release, Lucee will bring incredible flexibility to CFML and JVM
developers through a couple of key technologies.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.osgi.org/">OSGi</a> is a modular platform for the JVM which allows only
the necessary libraries to be loaded. So if, for example, you don't use
Hibernate, it doesn't get included and wont add any overhead. Railo was already
lightweight, and Lucee with OSGi will take this even further.</p>
<p><a href="https://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/final/jsr223/index.html">JSR223</a> or
"Scripting for the Java Platform" is a standard for embedding different languages
on the JVM, and what this means is being able to use Lucee to write CFML in far
more places than before. A good example is Ant build scripts - doing certain
things with Ant can be awkward and convoluted and Lucee 5 will allow embedding
CFML which makes those same tasks trivial.</p>
<p>Together these bring some great opportunies, and this is only the beginning...</p>
<h3>More Info</h3>
<p>I've tried to avoid simply parrotting what others have already written, so to
get further details on Lucee's launch and future you should definitely check out
<a href="http://blog.cmdbase.io/lucee/">Mark Drew's blog post</a>,
<a href="http://blog.adamcameron.me/2015/01/lucee.html">Adam Cameron's blog post</a>,
<a href="https://groups.google.com/d/msg/railo/B_1S3WzVPXY/wWrw_2KmjQ8J">the thread started by Igal on the Railo list</a>,
and of course the official Lucee website: <a href="http://lucee.org">lucee.org</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_0-8_release_candidateQueryParam Scanner 0.8 Release Candidate2013-06-29T15:15:00Z2013-06-29T15:15:00Z<p>The release candidate for the next version of <a href="http://sorcerersisle.com/projects:qpscanner.html">QueryParam Scanner</a> is
<a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/tree/rc0.8">available on GitHub</a>.</p>
<p>So what's changed?</p>
<p>Well it now runs on <a href="http://fw1.riaforge.org">FW/1</a> rather than <a href="http://fusebox.org">Fusebox</a>, and the UI has a new
theme - the previous gold/beige is gone, and in its place is a theme based on a
"new" logo which I've actually had sitting around for several years. There's CSS
used that will require a modern browser - FF4 and IE9 both work, but no
guarantees for anything older.</p>
<p>Functionality-wise there's a couple of fixes: an error is now thrown when a
directory doesn't exist (previous behaviour was to return 0 matches in 0 files),
and the IDs returned in data structures are now content-based hashes (previously
they were ever-changing UUIDs). Oh, and the IDs are now displayed with the HTML
results, in preparation for future functionality that'll potentially use them.</p>
<p>A new experimental (i.e. buggy) feature has been added to seperate the query
code into SELECT/FROM/WHERE/etc parts, when returning data structures. This may
help with post-processing the data, but has known flaws so use with care.
(The existing ORDER BY functionality has also been marked as experimental to
similarly indicate that it's not perfect.)</p>
<p>There's a minor change in that relative paths are officially <em>not</em> supported -
the UI always stated absolute paths or mappings were required, but there was
ugly code in place to try and make relative paths work too - that code has been
removed. If you used relative paths before, you need to resolve them before
passing to qpscanner.</p>
<p>In summary:</p>
<pre><code>Changed: Switched to FW/1 and removed unnecessary files.
Changed: New logo and front-end UI.
Removed: Dropped unofficial relative path support.
Added: Experimental ability to separate query code into segments
Fixed: IDs now use content-based SHA hashes, not random UUIDs.
Fixed: Throw error when path does not exist, instead of zero results.
Supports: ColdFusion 9/10 and Railo 3.3/4.0/4.1
</code></pre>
<p>That's it for now. There are several new features planned to make qpscanner
faster, more flexible and more useful, but you'll have to wait for a future
release for those.</p>
<p>As ever, if you have any feedback, feature requests, or find any bugs, then
please go ahead and get in touch via the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/issues">GitHub issue tracker</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/speaking_at_scotch_on_the_rocks_2013Speaking at Scotch on the Rocks 20132013-03-13T12:10:00Z2013-03-13T12:10:00Z<p>I will be speaking at this year's <a href="http://sotr.eu">Scotch on the Rocks</a> conference.
<a href="http://sotr.eu/index.cfm/main/presentation/by/peter_boughton">My presentation</a> is on the subject of getting help when you are stuck
and how to describe your issue in a way that makes it easier for others to help
you.</p>
<p>All developers have times when they need help, but it's not always easy to ask
for (particularly when all you want is to get past a tricky problem, not have
long tangental discussions). Having spent a lot of time both seeking and
offering help, I hope to shed some light on the quickest ways to find solutions
and effective methods for framing your issues so that fellow developers can
understand what you need.</p>
<p>The talk will be aimed at developers of any level who want help with getting help.</p>
<p>Scotch on the Rocks is Europe's longest running conference catering for CFML
developers, having been held most years since 2005. This year it takes place on
the 6th and 7th of June at the <a href="http://www3.hilton.com/en/hotels/united-kingdom/hilton-edinburgh-grosvenor-hotel-EDNGRHN/index.html">Hilton Edinburgh Grosvenor hotel</a> and
covers a <a href="http://sotr.eu/index.cfm/main/presentation">wide variety of topics</a> on different aspects of web development
- so whether you're looking to learn new techniques and technologies or you
want to network and socialise with other programmers, Scotch on the Rocks is the
conference for you.</p>
<p>Hurry up and <a href="http://sotr.eu/index.cfm/main/tickets">book your tickets</a> before they sell out!</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_v0-7-5_releasedQueryParam Scanner v0.7.5 Released2013-01-10T15:30:00Z2013-01-10T15:30:00Z<p>Earlier this week I promoted the release candidate for 0.7.5 of QueryParam Scanner
to full release.</p>
<p>For anyone unaware, <a href="http://sorcerersisle.com/projects:qpscanner.html">QueryParam Scanner</a> is a simple tool for identifying
unparameterised variables in CFML queries (which may indicate a potential SQL
injection risk).</p>
<p>This version has a handful of bug fixes and code cleanups, resulting in faster
more accurate scanning than previous versions, plus the addition of JSON output
format, giving a more lightweight option if used in scripted processes.</p>
<p>For further details on these, see the <a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_0-7-5_release_candidate">previous RC article</a>; other than
a couple of trivial fixes and a new readme, nothing has changed since that.</p>
<p>To download the latest version, you can either clone the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner.git">git repo</a>, or
grab it as a <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/zipball/v0.7.5">zip archive</a> from the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/tags">GitHub tags page</a>.</p>
<p>For any feedback, problems, or questions, please use the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/issues">issue tracker</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/happy_regex_day_2012Happy Regex Day 2012!2012-06-02T00:42:00Z2012-06-02T00:42:00Z<p>Today was the 1st June, and that means it's Regex Day again!</p>
<p>This annual event was started four years ago by <a href="http://www.bennadel.com/about/about-ben-nadel.htm">Ben Nadel</a> to celebrate this wonderful (yet often misunderstood) technology, and as usual Ben is running <a href="http://www.bennadel.com/blog/2383-The-5th-Annual-Regular-Expression-Day-And-Prizes-June-1st-2012.htm">a fun regex competition, with prizes, on his blog</a>.</p>
<p>If that's not enough regex goodness for you, here's a couple of projects you should know about.</p>
<p>First up, there's <strong><a href="http://xregexp.com/">XRegExp</a></strong>, a library by <a href="http://blog.stevenlevithan.com/about">Steven Levithan</a> which augments JavaScript's native regex functionality with new functionality, and ensures cross-browser compatibility.</p>
<p>For CFML developers, there's <strong><a href="http://cfregex.net">cfRegex</a></strong> a replacement regex implemenation providing more power and functionality than CFML's native functions, whilst being easier to work with.</p>
<p>Whatever your level of regex skill, both of these tools are definitely worth checking out.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_0-7-5_release_candidateQueryParam Scanner 0.7.5 Release Candidate2012-01-07T20:59:00Z2012-01-07T20:59:00Z<p>I have just pushed an update of QueryParam Scanner to <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner">GitHub</a>, containing
various improvements.</p>
<p>This update is on the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/tree/rc0.7.5">rc0.7.5 branch</a>, and it'd be nice if people could
take it for a spin and make sure there are no issues with it. (There is a
<a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/zipball/rc0.7.5">zip download</a> for anyone without git.)</p>
<p>The visible changes which you might notice are:</p>
<ul>
<li>Added JSON output format, giving an alternative to XML for anyone using
qpscanner in a scripted process.</li>
<li>Added variable for number of potential risk files, and improved related
wording in HTML output.</li>
<li>Fixed bug where identical queries were causing incorrect line numbers.</li>
<li>Fixed bug where query names were not being detected.</li>
<li>Fixed bug where blank lines were incorrectly removed.</li>
</ul>
<p>However, there are also significant under-the-hood changes. I removed my
obsolete "Java Regex Utils" library (replacing it with the object part of
<a href="http://cfregex.net">cfRegex</a>), and made a number of little code clean-ups.</p>
<p>A result of these changes is that qpscanner rc0.7.5 appears to be almost twice
as fast as previous versions.</p>
<p>If you have any feedback, please feel free to <a href="https://github.com/inbox/new/boughtonp">contact me via GitHub</a>,
and similarly if you find any bugs then please raise them on the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/issues">issue tracker</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_3-3Why Railo 3.3?2011-11-06T23:54:00Z2011-11-06T23:54:00Z<p>It's been over two and a half years since my last "why railo" post, and -
despite <a href="http://www.getrailo.org">Railo</a> "only" being 0.3 versions on - there's
been a lot of improvements!</p>
<p>In fact, because it's been so long, a few of the things here are not new with
v3.3 (though they are all new since the <a href="/articles/why_railo_3.html">previous article</a>),
but are still great features that deserve mentioning!</p>
<p><a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_3-3">Read on to find out what my ten favourite new feature are</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/cfml_on_wikipediaCFML on Wikipedia2011-10-02T23:08:00Z2011-10-02T23:08:00Z<p>If you've ever looked at the CFML related articles on Wikipedia, you can't fail
to have noticed that, especially when compared to other programming articles,
they're not very good.
<p>When somebody puts "coldfusion" or "cfml" into Google, they will almost
certainly see the respective Wikipedia pages amongst the top three results, but
when they follow those links they're unlikely to get a very good impression!
<p>Not only could both these pages themselves benefit significantly from being
cleaned up and improved, but there are only a few frameworks and tools that even
have pages, and most of what does exist are very unencyclopaedic stubs. And this
doesn't even consider the generic programming pages that often don't even mention CFML.
<p>Take a look at the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:CFML_programming_language">CFML category page</a>
- does that category contain everything you would expect an encyclopaedia to
cover about CFML? Check the pages for the frameworks you are familiar with - do
they go into the level of detail you would expect, and tell you everything you'd
want to know if you were entirely new to CFML?
<p>If you agree that the CFML presence on Wikipedia can and should be improved,
and it's up to the CFML community to do it, then
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/cfml_on_wikipedia">read on to find out how you can help fix it</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/introducing_the_cfregex_projectIntroducing the cfRegex Project!2011-07-22T23:20:00Z2011-07-22T23:20:00Z<p>The <a href="http://cfregex.net">cfRegex project</a> is two things. Firstly, it is a complete regex implementation
for CFML, providing more functionality, flexibility, features and power than the
existing CFML RE functions. Secondly, it is a drive to encourage people to
properly learn and make use of regex.
<p>Regex is a very flexible language for matching patterns within text, and it has
the power to greatly simplify certain programming tasks. However, it can also be
intimidating to people not experienced with it.
<p>This problem can be compounded by the relatively limited support for regex in
CFML, which often means code is written that is more complex than should be
necessary.
<p>cfRegex helps to address both these problems. It provides a number of functions
and features that help to reduce the amount of code which programmers have to
write, whilst also helping to make their code clearer and easier to understand.
In addition, the project provides documentation, not just for its own features,
but also for regex itself, helping people to understand exactly what their
expressions are matching, and how to get the most out of regex.
<p>Whilst cfRegex is still at a relatively early stage, it is currently usable, and
if you're a fan of regex it is certainly worth checking out.
<p>It currently runs on CF 9.0.1, OpenBD 2.0, Railo 3.2 and later.<br/>
<small>(Support for CF8 and others will be considered if enough people need it.)</small>
<p>The <a href="http://docs.cfregex.net/">documentation</a> should tell you everything you need to know about using it,
but if not then get it touch and say what's missing so it can be fixed!
<p>If you get stuck, there's a <a href="http://cfregex.net/discussion.html">mailing list</a> where you can receive answers to any
problems or questions you have.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_still_awesomeRailo: Still Awesome!2010-01-26T21:42:00Z2010-01-26T21:42:00Z<p>It's nearly a year on from my last Railo blog post so it is well overdue that I write another - just in case there is anyone still sitting on the fence, unsure if they should use Railo - or indeed, anyone who might be unaware of Railo's very existance!</p>
<br/>
<p>So to start with, a quick summary of what <a href="http://www.getrailo.com">Railo</a> is:</p>
<ul>
<li>Railo, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1QKOHThSiM#t=0m10s" title="(sounds like 'silo')">pronounced /&#712;ra&#618;.l&#601;&#650;/</a>, is super fast Enterprise-level sofware for RAD webapp and website creation.</li>
<li>Railo is LGPL-licensed <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software</a>, so anyone can use it how they like.</li>
<li>Railo runs on any <a href="http://java.sun.com/javaee/">Java EE</a> server, (but doesn't require Java knowledge), and is a <a href="http://www.jboss.org/">Jboss.org</a> project.</li>
<li>Railo uses the <a href="http://www.opencfml.org">CFML language</a>, like <a href="http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion">Adobe ColdFusion</a> (the primary CFML engine), <a href="http://www.openbluedragon.org">OpenBlueDragon</a>, and others.</li>
<li>Railo is really awesome.</li>
</ul>
<p><strong><a href="/articles/railo_still_awesome">Find out why Railo is the perfect choice for your next development project.</a></strong>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/java_regex_utilities_v0-7_previewJava RegEx Utilities - v0.7 preview2009-04-09T22:47:00Z2009-04-09T22:47:00Z<p><a href="http://www.hybridchill.com/projects/jre-utils.html">Java RegEx Utilities</a>, or jre-utils, is a CFC which provides a convenient way to access <a href="http://www.java.com">Java</a>'s <a href="http://www.regular-expressions.info/">regular expression</a> functionality.</p>
<p>Whilst <a href="http://www.adobe.com/coldfusion">ColdFusion</a>, <a href="http://www.getrailo.com">Railo</a>, and <a href="http://www.openbluedragon.org">openBD</a> are all built on Java, and <a href="http://www.opencfml.org">CFML</a> does have regular expression functions, they do not actually use the Java regular expression engine, which supports many useful regex constructs.</p>
<p>The purpose of jre-utils is to provide this extra power to CFML developers in a familiar and easy to use way.</p>
<p>I will shortly be releasing v0.7 of jre-utils, which adds a number of new functions, as well as making things more consistent, so I decided I would give this quick preview of what it contains.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/open_source_railoOpen Source Railo2009-03-31T22:03:00Z2009-03-31T22:03:00Z<p>Earlier today, the eagely awaited Railo 3.1 public beta was announced!</p>
<p>And the reason for much of this eagerness?</p>
<p><strong>Railo is now <a href="http://www.opensource.org/">Open Source</a> and <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software</a></strong>, released under the LGPL v2.</p>
<p>This license requires that any changes to Railo's sourcecode itself must also be released under LGPL v2 (or later version).</p>
<p>However, unlike the full GPL, it does not require that you release any packaged applications under a compatible license - so you can still use whatever license you like for your own CFML code, Open Source or otherwise.</p>
<p>Along with the announcement comes two new Railo websites: The commercial-oriented <a href="http://www.getrailo.com">getrailo.com</a> and the community-oriented <a href="http://www.getrailo.org">getrailo.org</a>, which also contains <a href="http://wiki.getrailo.org">wiki-based documentation</a>.</p>
<p>Details on updating this documentation, as well as information about the new features in Railo 3.1, will come later this week - stay tuned to the <a href="http://www.railo.ch/blog/">Railo blog</a> for the latest details.</p>
<p>The next four months are going to be a very exciting time for Railo and CFML!</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_3Why Railo 3?2009-03-01T02:53:00Z2009-03-01T02:53:00Z<p>It's been nearly half a year since Railo 3 was released, and with 3.1 just around the corner it is a good time to write a post about some of the features that continue to make Railo such an excellent CFML engine!</p>
<p>This blog entry covers things new to Railo 3 - however, if you've not looked at Railo before, you should also look at my previous postings, as they are still valid:</p>
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_3"><p>This blog entry gives ten reasons for using Railo 3...</a>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/creating_my_very_first_eclipse_pluginCreating my very first Eclipse Plugin2008-09-23T01:10:00Z2008-09-23T01:10:00Z<p>I recently* completed my very first Eclipse Plugin, and I found the whole experience to be very interesting.<br/>
<small class="a">*(well about a month ago; took me longer to get writing this than intended)</small></p>
<p>This blog entry will focus on two main areas - my experience with Eclipse (as opposed to CFEclipse and similar), and the issues I encountered from a development perspective</p>
<p><a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/creating_my_very_first_eclipse_plugin">Read on to find out about it</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_3-0_releasedRailo 3.0 released!2008-09-09T20:08:00Z2008-09-09T20:08:00Z<p>The long awaited Railo 3.0 is out of Beta and available to all.</p>
<p>There are a lot of exciting new features with Railo 3.0: multimedia video conversion and manipulation, video player with playlisting, task manager, cluster scope, CF8 compatibility, and more.</p>
<p>Also, with Railo 3.0, the Community and Professional versions have been combined - keeping the price of the Community edition (i.e free), but without the previous restrictions this had. (With Railo 3.1 due later this year, Railo will fully become <a href="http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html">Free Software</a>, under the LGPL2 license.)</p>
<p>For more details, the best place to head is the rebrushed <a href="http://www.railo.ch/en/">Railo website</a>, which has been updated to provide information on <a href="http://railo3.railo.ch/en/index.cfm?treeID=353">what is new with Railo 3.0</a>.</p>
<p>There will also be a three part series on the <a href="http://www.railo.ch/blog">Railo blog</a> covering the new features. The <a href="http://www.railo.ch/blog/index.cfm/2008/9/9/Railo-30-released--Features-part-1">first entry in the series</a> is already available.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_eclipse_pluginQueryParam Scanner - Eclipse Plugin2008-08-26T00:24:00Z2008-08-26T00:24:00Z<p>The first pre-release version of the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin is now available.</p>
<p>This is the very first Eclipse plugin I have created. It was an interesting
experience, and something that I will be writing up in a separate entry as soon
as I can collect my thoughts.</p>
<p>It order to use the plugin, you must be using v0.7 or higher of qpScanner -
if you do not yet have this, you can download the
<a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/zipball/develop">latest
development version of qpScanner</a>, which contains details of the Update Site
to use. If for any reason you cannot use the regular Eclipse Update method, you
can directly <a href="http://eclipse.hybridchill.com/plugins/hybridchill.eclipse.qpscanner_0.1.0.0.jar">download the qpScanner Eclipse Plugin</a> instead.</p>
<p>Just to be clear, both v0.7 of QueryParam Scanner and v0.1 of the qpScanner
Eclipse Plugin are currently considered development releases, and are being made
available so that they can be tested and any bugs that might exist can be found
- if you are unwilling to use pre-release software you should wait until the
official release.</p>
<p>If you do get the Eclipse Plugin, or even just qpScanner on its own, I
welcome any and all feedback you might have - whether to report bugs you have
found, request new features you would like, or simply to let me know that works
with your local setup.</p>
<p>Please send feedback via the <a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner/issues">GitHub Issue system</a>.
<br/>
<p>Related websites:</p>
<ul class="compact">
<li><a href="http://sorcerersisle.com/projects:qpscanner.html">QueryParam Scanner official website</a></li>
<li><a href="http://qpscanner.riaforge.org">QueryParam Scanner project page at RIAForge</a></li>
<li><a href="https://github.com/boughtonp/qpscanner">QueryParam Scanner project page at GitHub</a></li>
</ul>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_v0-7_devQueryParam Scanner v0.7-dev2008-08-17T01:01:00Z2008-08-17T01:01:00Z<p>The latest development version of qpScanner is now in SVN at <a href="http://qpscanner.riaforge.org/">RIAForge</a>.</p>
<p>It would be great if people could test it out and let me know of any issues they encounter.</p>
<p>As before, it is all self-contained, so it can be installed and run with minimal effort.</p>
<p><strong>Note:</strong> As this is still the development version, you need to use the zip option at the bottom of the RIAForge page, <em>not</em> the "Download Project" link - the button will only give the old version.</p>
<p>When released, v0.7 will be a significant new version,
so I want to give <a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scanner_v0-7_dev">a quick discussion of the new features</a>...http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/expandpath_bug_in_cf8expandPath bug in CF82008-08-16T18:23:00Z2008-08-16T18:23:00Z<p>I've just encountered a very annoying bug with the expandPath function in CF8.</p>
<p>Take the following code:</p>
<pre><code>&lt;cfset MyDir = "."/>
&lt;cfloop index="i" from="1" to="5">
&lt;cfset MyDir = expandPath(MyDir)/>
&lt;cfoutput>&lt;br/>#MyDir#&lt;/cfoutput>
&lt;/cfloop></code></pre>
<p>Run the code through Railo and you will get exactly the right behaviour, with the current directory output five times:</p>
<pre><code>C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch
C:\dev\scratch</code></pre>
<p>Now go run the same code with CF8 - and this is what you get:</p>
<pre><code>F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch
F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch\F:\ColdFusion8\wwwroot\scratch</code></pre>
<p>It simply stacks the current directory onto the front each time. Very frustrating.</p>
<br/>
<p>In order to get round this, I created a regular expression to pull off the last value of any directory containing more than one colon - this will work for Windows machines, but may need to be changed for Linux or MacOSX machines (if the bug affects these).</p>
<pre><code>&lt;cfif isDefined('Server.ColdFusion.ProductName')
AND Server.ColdFusion.ProductName EQ 'ColdFusion Server'
AND ListLen( MyDir ,':') GT 2>
&lt;cfset MyDir = REreplace( MyDir , "^.*([A-Z]:[^:]+)$" , "\1" )/>
&lt;/cfif></code></pre>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_goes_open_source_with_jboss-org_updateRailo goes Open Source with JBoss.org (Update)2008-06-08T18:59:00Z2008-06-08T18:59:00Z<p>As promised previously,
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_goes_open_source_with_jboss-org_update">here is a more detailed entry</a> on the announcement to Open Source the Railo CFML engine.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/scotch_on_the_rocks_2008Scotch on the Rocks 20082008-06-06T23:57:00Z2008-06-06T23:57:00Z<p>Scotch on the Rocks 2008 is now unfortunately ended,
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/scotch_on_the_rocks_2008">read on</a> to see my thoughts.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_goes_open_source_with_jboss-orgRailo goes Open Source with JBoss.org2008-06-05T18:30:00Z2008-06-05T18:30:00Z<p>Today at the midday Scotch keynote, Gert Franz and Luc Texier made an impressive announcement: <strong>Railo is going completely Open Source.</strong></p>
<br/>
<p>This is an exciting move both for Railo and for the CFML community as a whole, and I'll be writing more details about it later, but for now here some some quick key details...</p>
<p>There will be two editions of Railo, with the Community and Professional editions combining into one, and the Enterprise edition being the other:</p>
<p>The new Community+Professional edition will be Open Source and there will be no limit to the number of web contexts allowed.</p>
<p>The Enterprise edition will have added value features, including tools from Intergral.</p>
<br/>
<p>The license will be LGPL2, which means you can distribute Railo along with commercial software.</p>
<p>The timeline for release of the source code is mid to late October, around the time that Railo 3.1 is due for release.</p>
<p>The announcement is online at the JBoss website at <a href="http://www.jboss.org/railo">www.jboss.org/railo</a></p>
<br/>
<p><strong>More Information available:</strong> <a href="/articles/Railo_goes_Open_Source_with_JBoss-org_update.html">Railo goes Open Source with JBoss.org (Update)</a></p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/queryparam_scannerQueryParam Scanner2008-04-06T18:42:00Z2008-04-06T18:42:00Z<p>The code for my <a href="http://qpscanner.riaforge.org">QueryParam Scanner</a>
has been uploaded to <a href="http://www.riaforge.org">RIAForge</a>.</p>
<p>QueryParam Scanner is a simple tool which scans your code for queries and
reports back about any variables that are not inside <code>&lt;cfqueryparam/&gt;</code> tags.</p>
<p><a href="http://qpscanner.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=action.download">Download QueryParam Scanner from RIAForge</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/java_regex_utilitiesJava RegEx Utilities2008-04-06T00:30:00Z2008-04-06T00:30:00Z<p>I have just released <a href="http://jreutils.riaforge.org">Java RegEx Utilities</a> on <a href="http://www.riaforge.org">RIAForge</a>, which is a CFC enabling easy access to Java Regular Expression functionality, adding to what is available in the standard CFML functions.</p>
<p>Currently there are two main functions.</p>
<p><code>jre.<b>get</b>(Text,RegEx)</code> returns the matches to the regular expression as an array.</p>
<p><code>jre.<b>replace</b>(Text,RegEx,Replacement)</code> is similar to REReplace, but the Replacement argument can be a function pointer, allowing you to process the results of a regex match with a function</p>
<p>You can find more usage details on the <a href="http://jreutils.riaforge.org/wiki/">jre-utils wiki</a>, which I plan to update with some examples of when each of these functions can be useful.</p>
<p>I have tested jre-utils against Railo 2 and CFMX 7, but it should also work with ColdFusion 8 and the Java version of BlueDragon - if anyone can test/confirm this please let me know.</p>
<p><a href="http://jreutils.riaforge.org/index.cfm?event=action.download">Download Java RegEx Utilities from RIAForge</a>.</p>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/fusebox_5-5_is_out_nowFusebox 5.5 is out now!2007-12-03T23:44:00Z2007-12-03T23:44:00Z<p>The highly anticapted next major version of Fusebox has finally been <a href="http://www.fusebox.org/index.cfm?objectID=A13FA6AA-C448-15CC-1FEFB38ABEA2EC82">released to the website</a>.</p>
<p>Fusebox 5.5 allows you to use the Fusebox applications without using XML, which should please many people.</p>
<p>Instead of fusebox.xml it checks conventional places for your circuits, and instead of circuit.xml it can either use CFCs, where each function is a fuseaction, or just a directory, where each file is a fuseaction.</p>
<p>It also brings support for dynamic do to both xml and non-xml configuration, which is a feature I've really wanted on a couple of occasions.</p>
<p>Get it while it's hot...</p>
<p><a href="http://fusebox.org/go/fusebox-downloads/core-files">http://fusebox.org/go/fusebox-downloads/core-files</a>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_2-0_out_nowRailo 2.0 out now!2007-08-29T01:48:00Z2007-08-29T01:48:00Z<p>The final release of Railo 2.0 is now available for download from the re-vamped <a href="http://railo.ch/en">Railo website</a>.</p>
<p>If you've already tried Railo, you'll probably be wanting to head straight to <a href="http://www.railo.ch/en/index.cfm?treeID=224">the download page</a>.</p>
<p>If you want to know more about what Railo is and why you might be interested,
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_2-0_out_now">read on...</a>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_2Why Railo 2?2007-06-06T22:58:00Z2007-06-06T22:58:00Z<p>A while ago I wrote an entry about why people should consider Railo. Well,
with the Release Candidate for version 2.0, there comes a lot more reasons
for using Railo.
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo_2">And here are twenty of them...</a>http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railoWhy Railo?2007-02-07T21:36:00Z2007-02-07T21:36:00Z<p>In the near future I'll be getting myself a dedicated server, and decided to
find out if anyone would be interested if I was to setup Railo hosting on
it. So, I posted on the CF-Talk mailing list to see if anyone was
interested, and <em>crikey</em>, what a reaction I got! The discussion is
currently the longest in the past four dozen threads.
<p>The first few replies basically boiled down to was "why would anyone want
Railo hosting?!?".</p>
<p>Tempting as it is to reply with <i>"Railo PWNS U l4m3rz!"</i>, I've decided
that I'll instead explain why <em>I</em> choose Railo, over all the other CFML
engines available (CFMX, BlueDragon and Smith being the significant
alternatives).
<p>However, to prevent me from rambling on for hours about how wonderful Railo
is -- and I really could talk about it all day -- I am simply going to pick
just five things that should help to show what attracts me to Railo.
<p><a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/why_railo">Read on</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_1-1_betaRailo 1.1 Beta2007-01-01T21:04:00Z2007-01-01T21:04:00Z<p>The latest version of Railo is now available as a public beta from the
<a href="http://www.railo.ch/en/index.cfm?treeID=159">Railo customer center</a>,
and it brings with it an exciting new feature: Resources.</p>
<p>Resources are a brilliant feature that allows you to perform file actions on
virtual filesystems such as in memory, ZIP archives, and FTP sites.</p>
<p><a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railo_1-1_beta">Read on to find out more</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/cfdevcon_2006cfDevCon 20062006-11-09T22:49:00Z2006-11-09T22:49:00Z<p>Okay, so I've arrived back from <a href="http://www.cfdevcon.com">the UK's first* ColdFusion developers' conference</a> (*if you ignore the previous two UK-based CF conferences), and decided I would give
<a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/cfdevcon_2006">my thoughts about it</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/link_lexicon_verb_for_fusebox_5Link lexicon verb for Fusebox 52006-11-08T17:54:00Z2006-11-08T17:54:00Z<p>I have created a simple custom verb which allows you to link specified resource files from circuit.xml, without having to go to the bother of writing it all in a script and including it.</p>
<p>For example, you can do this:</p>
<pre><code>&lt;cf:link resource="/res/bubbles.css"/&gt;<br/>&lt;cf:link resource="/res/bubbles.js"/&gt;</code></pre>
<p>And it will convert that and place the following inside your HTML head:</p>
<pre><code>&lt;link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="/res/bubbles.css"/&gt;<br/>&lt;script type="text/javascript" src="/res/bubbles.js"&gt;&lt;/script&gt;</code></pre>
<p>This should be useful if you have a lot of different circuits that all have unique styles and scripts, and you'd rather avoid putting lots of conditional statements in your layout pages.</p>
<p>For more information and a download link, <a href="http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/link_lexicon_verb_for_fusebox_5">read the article</a>.http://sorcerers-tower.net/articles/railoRailo2006-07-17T20:31:00Z2006-07-17T20:31:00Z<p>Railo is the best CFML engine.</p>
<p>I guess you'll be wanting me to validate that statement? Well I'll make a start on that in a moment, but first I think I'll post a few disclaimers to pre-empt any potential whiney people.</p>
<p>I have nothing against Adobe, NewAtlanta, CFMX, nor BlueDragon. They're both great companies/products - without the company formally known as Allaire, I'd never have had my life enriched by the joy that is ColdFusion - and BlueDragon is no doubt a fine product if you find yourself stuck using that .NET thing. ;)</p>
<p>But Railo is better than both of them, and here is why...</p>